subject: Ppc Advertising - Ignore These 5 Pointers At Your Peril [print this page] If you want an effective way to get potential customers to your website, Pay Per Click marketing is a superb way to do this. You can set up a campaign which shows adverts based on the keywords and phrases which surfers enter when they are looking for things on search engines such as Yahoo, Bing and Google, to name just a few.
The huge plus is that people who click your ads have already shown some commitment in what you have to offer. As long as your website follows through with what was described in the ad, then you have a very good chance of making a sale or scoring a conversion.
However, for a newbie just getting started in Internet Marketing, using PPC can be scary! It can also be extremely expensive if you don't know what you are doing.
Avoid the following tips at your peril if you want to see a return on your investment.
1. Make a website that actually converts. If your website cannot turn visitors into customers then there is little point in sending traffic to it. Work on your copy. Make it clear for your visitor what they need to do to purchase your product or service.
2. Keep your ads relevant to what people are searching on. If somebody enters "Volvo" into Google, then they want to see ads which relate to that particular car model. Improving relevancy will also improve your click thru rate (or CTR as it's known).
3. Make your landing page relevant. Similar to making your ads relevant, if someone clicks an ad specifying "Audi" in the ad text, they most likely don't want to land on a page on your website which doesn't talk about that particular car make.
4. You need to split test. This is the process of testing multiple versions of the same page. You might change the layout, the copy (wording), even the color of the background. All of these may have an effect on increasing or reducing the conversion rate of your site. There are guidelines, but really there is no certain way of being sure what will have the greatest impact without doing this kind of testing.
5. Don't pause your campaign too early. The biggest mistake newbies make is to not allocate enough money just for the purpose of testing. I can pretty much guarantee that you won't make money from the start. You need to test and tweak and continue doing that until your campaign is profitable.
PPC can be a highly lucrative method of driving traffic to and ultimately generating income from your website, but make sure you take the time to learn the basics and approach it from a scientific standpoint rather than emotive.
